For centuries, Kolhapuri chappals have been the footwear of Maharashtrians. In 2019, they were formally given a Geographical Indication stamp, protecting their heritage and regional identity. In 2025, they walked the Prada runway.
The sandal seemed unremarkable at first glance: slim leather straps, clean lines, a muted palette that matched Prada’s minimalist ethos. Yet, for many Indians, its outline was unmistakable. Prada didn’t acknowledge its lineage, sparking immediate backlash about the absence of credit. Within days, the Italian fashion house issued a rare apology.
And yet the Prada episode was not an isolated misstep but part of a much older story. Fashion has always transformed everyday cultural objects into global commodities, sometimes with credit, often without. Each time, the same questions surface: what separates appreciation from appropriation? And perhaps more urgently, who profits and who disappears in the process?
A century before Prada’s sandal, the couturier Paul Poiret introduced a Parisian craze around ‘harem pants’. The billowing trousers, derived loosely from Middle Eastern and South Asian silhouettes, were marketed as revolutionary, liberating women from corsets and skirts. French society debated their propriety; critics called them scandalous. But the scandal made Poiret a celebrity. The garment’s layered histories, its regional makers, were left out of the conversation altogether.
Half a century later, American counterculture reached for similar vocabularies. Hippies adopted kurtas, Nehru jackets, and, most iconically, paisley — a motif with its own long, winding journey: once a Persian boteh, then woven into Kashmiri shawls, later mass-produced by Scottish mills, before being rebranded as a universal symbol of bohemia in 1960s USA. To wear a paisley shirt in San Francisco was to signal rebellion; to weave one in Kashmir was to survive an economic system that commodified the work as ‘exotic’.
In 2019, Gucci marketed a $790 turban on Nordstrom’s website. For Sikh communities in the US and abroad, the sight was painful: a sacred article of faith rebranded as novelty accessory. Nordstrom pulled the listing after backlash, but the incident underscored how cultural symbols are emptied of meaning when filtered through retail systems. Similarly, in 2026, Ralph Lauren sent models down the runway wearing silver jhumkas, immediately sparking criticism about ‘whitewashing’ brown cultures.
The tension, then, isn’t simply about ‘borrowing’ or ‘stealing’. It’s about who gets to be remembered as visionary and who gets left as background. Poiret is remembered as an innovator; the hippies as style revolutionaries. The artisans and cultures whose forms they borrowed were simply treated as raw material.
Not Just the West
It would be easy to frame cultural appropriation as a simple story of the West stealing from the Global South. But the truth is more complicated, and less comfortable.
Even within India, fashion replicates the same hierarchies. Mirrorwork from Kutch, bandhakala from Odisha, or phulkari from Punjab reappear in luxury collections on Mumbai and Delhi runways. These traditional crafts are recast as ‘contemporary Indian chic’, while the artisans themselves remain invisible. A couturier’s reinterpretation will be hailed in fashion glossies, while the cluster that keeps the tradition alive is relegated to the backdrop.
Bollywood, too, has been a major appropriator. Costumes borrow freely from regional dress — the nauvari sari of Maharashtra, a nine-yard drape designed for ease of movement, or the phanek of Manipur, a handwoven wraparound skirt with deep cultural and ritual significance. Restyled for spectacle and glamour, stripped of context, what was once an everyday identity marker becomes either caricature or fleeting ‘trend’.
The erasures deepen with caste and community. Dalit and indigenous aesthetics — tattoos, beadwork, woven textiles are sometimes lifted into urban ‘boho’ fashion without acknowledgement. What appears as edgy styling in a Mumbai boutique is the same design that is stigmatized when worn by its origin community.
Indian fashion too has long absorbed silhouettes from elsewhere. Our own luxury houses borrow freely from Western codes of chic: tuxedo tailoring, Art Deco embellishments, the ‘little black dress’. The difference of course, lies in the power dynamics. Across geographies, the story repeats: sacred or everyday dress becomes exoticized, repackaged, resold — with the origin community forced to fight for recognition as custodians rather than decoration.
Making the case for cultural sensitivity isn’t just an Indian or South Asian problem of course. In Mexico, the Mixe community has repeatedly pushed back against designers lifting their traditional blouse patterns without consent. In Nigeria, Yoruba adire — the indigo-dyed resist textile now displayed in global museum shows and reimagined on luxury runways — still leaves its makers with fragile livelihoods. And in Morocco, the caftan drifts in and out of Western trend reports as “boho chic,” stripped of its grounding as a living garment tradition.
All of which underscores the deeper point: appropriation isn’t solely about geography — East vs. West, North vs. South. It is about power. Who gets to transform a craft into couture, and who is left unnamed in the process? Who crosses borders freely, and who is told their dress is “too ethnic,” “too traditional,” or “too niche”?
Cultural ‘homage’ isn’t always doomed to misfire. Done with care, collaboration, and credit, it can open doors rather than close them. Dior’s 2023 show at Mumbai’s Gateway of India, for instance, wasn’t perfect — some critics noted the spectacle outweighed the storytelling, but it did something rare: it placed Indian craft on a global luxury stage, with artisans visibly acknowledged in pre-show materials.
Smaller labels like Raw Mango and Pero set a different precedent: naming weavers, spotlighting craftspeople in campaigns, and making sure the ‘handmade’ isn’t just marketing gloss but a living partnership.
Elsewhere, designers like Stella Jean have built collections around collaborations with artisans from Haiti to Burkina Faso, ensuring royalties and credit flow back to the communities whose work inspires the clothes. In menswear, labels like Wales Bonner and Bode have shown how heritage can be central, not ornamental — drawing from Caribbean tailoring or American workwear without reducing them to moodboard aesthetics.
In India, too, smaller labels like Raw Mango and Pero set a different precedent: naming weavers, spotlighting craftspeople in campaigns, and making sure the ‘handmade’ isn’t just marketing gloss but a living partnership.
It’s tempting to keep asking the familiar question — was this respectful, or was it offensive? But that binary feels increasingly inadequate. The more urgent question is: what structures exist to ensure visibility, credit, and compensation travel alongside the aesthetic?
Homage is not about moodboards or polite footnotes. It’s about contracts that outlive a season, royalties that flow beyond the runway, and credits that show up not just in show notes but on the product tag. Imagine a Kolhapuri sandal carrying the name of its maker as proudly as the house that sells it.
Fashion has always been about circulation — of cloth, of silhouettes, of symbols. But circulation without recognition is erasure. The industry doesn’t need to stop ‘borrowing’; it needs to start acknowledging that such ‘inspiration’ comes with responsibility.
Because in the end, the Kolhapuri is not just a sandal. The turban is not just a headpiece. The paisley is not just a motif. They are cultural legacies — reshaped, rebranded, resold. And each time they travel, they tell us less about the garment than about the hands we choose to see, and the hands we don’t.
